Question for Leftists: What Happens When There’s Nothing Left to Steal?

More than two years ago, I explained in a TV interview that the looters and moochers should be careful that they don’t kill the geese that lay the golden eggs. After all, parasites need a healthy host.

The collapse of Europe’s welfare states should be a wake-up call for these people, but that hasn’t stopped the demands for more redistribution in Washington. As Michael Barone noted, the folks on the left assume that there will always be someone to plunder.

But at least the piglets in this Chuck Asay cartoon are finally waking up to reality.

108 Responses

They cannot imagine such a time because they have no understanding of how people make decisions. They think people are entrepreneurs by genetic design or mutation and cannot help but make money for everybody else.
That’s the way it is on Progressive Fantasy Island.

The way our system works, if they lead the effort to stop the stealing, the first person to reap a penalty is them. No immediate penalty for their peers that try to continue stealing. NO penalty for the people who are no longer being stolen from. The only one penalized is the person who tries to stop. Like being the first person of the group to let go of the rampaging tiger’s tail. Not a good system. Not a system where this is likely to motivate the crooks at the top.

Not realistic to expect this to happen top down. Even with the major effort of sending Tea Party motivated politicians with long histories of being staunch conservatives, the system is so stacked against them that initially they are just making noise. Takes years for them to acquire any tenure to actually get on any committees to affect change and then only after they are in the favor of the chairman de jour.

ONLY realisitc way for this to be fixed is for the states, the only parties with “standing”, to do an article 5 convention and then do ammendments that they would actually ratify, taking power back away from DC and restoring the original blueprint. Not dangerous as purported by the MSM, because any looney-left ammendments would not be likely to ever get a quoram of votes.

I have no real expectation that this will end either top down or bottom up until the whole mess collapses. Then, if we are lucky, we will avoid a hard tyranny and see a return to sound policies. Currently there is no incentive to dismantle the bureaucracy.

Even for those who realize it, decline is now putting too much stress in their personal lives to let go. Past the Event Horizon, the vicious cycle has now a life of its own. The “…I’m desperate, lets raise income taxes on everybody and add VAT plus excise levies” moment is coming.

In addition, Paul Krugman says that you can post-process raw productivity with macroeconomic gimmicks and have a nation that enjoys a standard of living above its production (*). Five loaves and two fishes under Keynesian manipulation can feed the masses. The scrips are ready, have worked many times in other countries, people have bought them, Americans will buy them too,

(*) Note: Even the much maligned Greeks were only able to live a mere 20% above their production levels and you can see how it ended.

Like the electrician, who once electrocuted, cannot let go of the hot line taking him to his death.

Like the Soviets kept reacting to decline with more coercion and mandatory collectivism. Like Europe is reacting to ever declining welfare incentives to produce with “more Europe”. Like the American voter is reacting to a loss of standard of living with more HopNChange….

The emerging three billion, even partially liberated, people of this planet have little desire or patience to see how the Western World’s experiment with the very mandatory collectivism the East is rejecting will turn out. The western decline is now being relegated into a sideshow, in a world that manages to grow 4-5% annually — western lemming voters be damned. They’re becoming irrelevant.

Whoever wrote this is a moron. I like that “taxing” is now “stealing”. And anyone that uses the term Obamacare is clearly too stupid to have any legitimate complaints.

We’d have plenty of money if the politicians listened to the economists and the millionaires and billionaires in general. Instead, they listen to the few saps that pay people to write skewed articles like this.

And what do they never go after? The fucking ‘defense’ budget. Our military budget is ridiculously inflated. No, instead they go after things that tax payers pay into, such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. You want to argue about Welfare, fine. But we pay into the other three, we should get it back. The ONLY reason that Social Security isn’t secure anymore is because the stupid fucking politicians took money out of the Social Security surplus to give tax-breaks to millionaires and billionaires.

Did I mention that the majority of millionaires and billionaires don’t even want these fucking tax cuts? This article is nothing but corporatist trash and right-wing propaganda. Let’s go after the ‘left’. Let’s pay absolutely no attention to the gods damned bloated defense budget. Let’s pay no attention to the bank bailouts. Let’s pay no attention to the 7.7 trillion dollars we gave to the banks practically for free. It’s sad and it’s pathetic.

All this is is an attempt to attack the poor and middle class so that a handful of corrupt assholes can make a few extra million.

Apart from the bad language (probably a childish attempt at creating shock value), a previous commenter shows real gullibility.
Most millionaires and billionaires who support increase INCOME taxes don’t have to worry about income taxes because they can divert their income into tax-free shelters. I’d like to ask Warren Buffett if he’d be just as excited about a wealth tax on billionaires, if he thinks that the government could spend his wealth (not his income) more wisely than he.
The Social Security (not-much)trust fund was placed on budget in the late sixties, when Congress was dominated by Democrats. I’m pretty sure it was signed into law by LBJ, though it might have been done by Nixon (as close to a real fascist as the Republicans have put forward in my lifetime).
I agree that the military budget is bloated, but a lot of the bloat has to do with Congressmen and -women wanting to protect projects in their districts or states.
A libertarian philosophy would benefit the poor and middle class not through the kind of handouts that progressives promise but through eliminating a lot of the oppressive government that robs the poor and the middle class of their opportunities. Of course, when one is given an opportunity, one has to take advantage of that opportunity, and that might mean work.
The choice is pretty clear to me: an opportunity to work hard to achieve success, or an opportunity to sit around and rely on the government to give you a small share of a shrinking pie.

Bad language was there because I pretty much copy-and-pasted from a comment I made on Facebook between friends, who posted this. I didn’t think about the ‘bad language’ until after I posted it, and I can’t delete it (or don’t know how) to edit it. So my apologies.

But most of this is just plain ridiculous. People aren’t asking for handouts here. The fact that OWS is ridiculed for wanting “handouts” is the saddest amount of propaganda I’ve seen in my lifetime, aside from the bull that came from Fox News about Obama’s birth certificate. We all want a fair shot, and we’re tired of all the crap. The majority of millionaires and billionaires aren’t job creators. The real job creation comes from small business.

What we’re seeing in the government today is a love and protection of the richest people in the United States, and a complete neglect and disregard for those that want to create small business. In fact, the childishly labelled “Obamacare” has made a few small business people happy. There is a local small businesswoman here in Columbus that is excited for the Affordable Healthcare for America Act because it will allow her to compete with bigger businesses for employment.

There’s plenty wrong with HR 3962, and most of it is the watering down that came when President Obama gave into the pressure from Fox News, Republicans, and ‘conservative’ Democrats.

I’m not going to state that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are perfect. They aren’t, but pretending we can’t afford them is foolish. We need to get Obama and the other conservatives to stop babying the richest people in this nation and even those that aren’t in this nation. The wealthiest Americans and foreigners have benefited greatly from various “welfare” programs. Enormous tax cuts, ridiculous deregulation of banks that helped cause our current financial crisis, and the deregulation of safety on oil rigs, in mines, and in construction work. Let’s not forget oil subsidies either. That’s unnecessary welfare. Then there’s the pointless “War on Drugs”. Why are we waging a war on drugs? Aren’t we a capitalist society? If snorting cocaine doesn’t hurt anyone else, why can’t I buy it?

I got a little derailed there. My point is, we aren’t asking for handouts, we’re asking for fairness. The income inequality in this nation is ridiculous, and the people that have benefited the most from tax payers aren’t the poor or the middle class, it’s the richest foreigners and Americans. We need to cut them off. They are not making jobs in this country because they are keeping things inaffordable. They destroy small businesses and then raise taxes in their own corporations. We need to take away power from the corporations and bring it back to the American tax payer. That’s the real source of the problem, not leftist social programs.

And hey, after we stop babying the wealthiest people in the world, if the social programs become the biggest problem, we’ll deal with them. But maybe if more people actually got off their rear ends and took the fight to their congressmen and senators, we might make a change. Instead, people feed into this propaganda that the rich are under attack and being overtaxed, despite the fact Obama has lowered taxes for *everyone* more than Bush.

If you took every bit of income from the wealthiest folks in America, the top few percent who are already paying for the bulk of the cost of running the country, it would only cover a little over 2/3 of what the federal nationalist government is spending. And then you provide incentive for those wealthiest people to just leave and set up shop elsewhere. Not a desireable outcome.

And all the talk about cutting the militarism spending, you are starting to sound like Ron Paul. Maybe you aren’t a lib/prog at all.

@Toni: it sounds to me like with just a bit more rational thought, and perhaps just a few more years away from your progressive college professors, you’ll begin to understand what the real situation is. You never, ever have to do anything for rich people–you can buy their products or their services, but you don’t have to. OTOH, you MUST pay taxes to people in DC who will use the tax money for their own benefit. The villains here are not the rich except insomuch as they use their money to influence the real powerbrokers, the congressmen, the President, and the bureaucrats who hold the power over all of us, the power of the police to enforce their wishes upon us. Most of the people who will be negatively affected by an increase in the income tax are people who want the same things you want–a fair chance to earn a livelihood without unfair intrusions by others.
Blaming the rich is simply a strategy devised by the real powerbrokers to make a lot of people think that DC is on your side. It is not. DC is on DC’s side, which is why the politicians and bureaucrats object to anything that will decentralize power–privatizing social security, returning control of education to the states, etc.
Don’t believe what your professors told you. Don’t believe what the politicians tell you. Do some research and ask yourself this question about every single policy issue–cui bono.

Not one of you leftists answered the big question! What is the end game, what is your plan to feed and house the population when you have completed the destruction of all successful and productive people?

What is the plan when you no longer have any “Millionaires and Billionaires” to take money from?

It is easy to sharpshoot and badmouth the sytem, and it certainly has flaws. However, libertarianism and some of the far right or far left ideas just don’t meet muster. There is no question that the military has sucked us dry. From a country that had mandatory draft we have gravitated to the must overpaid citizens in AMerica..the armed forces. 20 years of service as a master sargeant and you can earn 150K/year, be fed, clothed, follow orders, have all your needs cared for by the govt.. The military is the largest pure communist organizations on the planet. We hate peace, because our largest corporations would go broke with it. We have to have an enemy, because the military industrial complex would die without it. We spend more than the next how many countries on defense? We have over 600 foreign bases and our “enemies” have 6? We gripe when our economy slows, but guess what? Automation and free trade has been what is killing America and will kill capitalism. By 2050, 100% of the goods and services that will be consumed by the human race will only require 5% of the human race to produce those goods and services. Now…do you think that bodes well for stability or perhaps instability. If you think 95% of the people willing to work will sit on the sidelines and starve to death so 5% can keep having fun, you are in for a rude surprise.
Before long, we will have many 2000 acre farms with 5 employees total producing enough food to feed hundreds of thousands of people. Cars, phones, TV’s, all will be robotically put together. However, economically, something will have to give, because the products won’t be able to be sold to a penniless world’s population.

I don’t know how old Kim is, but I remember when we were told that by the 1990s everyone would have his or her own helicopter (yes, the Jetsons). I also remember when we were told that the world would run out of oil, completely out of oil, by the year 2000. Neither of those things happened. Of course, there have been changes. While we could imagine computers and robots being part of our future, I cannot remember anyone ever talking about careers in computer programming. To quote Tevya, “Unheard of! Absurd!”
I was in the library at my college the other day and saw a copy (on sale for 10 cents) of one of those Alvin Toffler books. What a joke.
Things are sure to change, but the dire predictions of what will happen without some extreme government involvement are usually made by those who want extreme government involvement and think they can scare us into it (unfortunately, they are gradually succeeding). I would never have imagined a country in which people were destroying the environment merely by breathing, but that is the country the EPA has created.
Most of the world’s hunger is not caused by evil rich people but by evil powerful people, and power is in the government, not in the money. You can choose not to buy from Wal-Mart, or from Apple, or from MicroSoft. You cannot choose to not pay your taxes.
Our country was at its best when people solved their own problems rather than looking for a lawyer/politician or a lawyer/bureaucrat to solve their problems for them. Until we get back to that, we will continue our current decline.

I am probably a lot older than you, Paul, but then again we all get born somewhere. I did my stint in Viet Nam, so you can get an idea of my age. I also have seen how much productivity has been rewarded over my lifetime. You may not have been around, but when I was working for minimum wage, $1/hr, I could buy 5.6 gal. of gas for an hours worth of work, as gas was selling at $.179/gal. The amazing thing was that somebody pumped my gas, and they also washed my windows EVERY TIME, and asked if I needed my oil checked or tire pressure checked. Since that time we have automated those jobs away, and now on minimum wage, you might get 2 gallons of gas instead of 5.6/gal for one hour of work, you pump the gas, and you check the oil and wash your own windows. When I first went to sea, there were crews of 42 on T-2 tankers that carried about 110K/ bbls of gasoline. Now, it would take 9 of those ships which would have employed 378 people being replaced with ONE ship employing 16-20 people. Gasoline was selling for $.249 back then, so a loss of nearly 90% of the jobs due to automation or improved productivity, eliminated 358 jobs and gave the population an opportunity to pay $3.00 gal for gasoline instead of a quarter of a gallon. These computer jobs will soon be gone in many places as computers will be making computers. Few will be needed in the work force. If you had been around as long as I had, you would have seen how automation has affected the world. Sorry to pop your bubble Paul, but it has now been popped.

OTOH, when we were kids, if we went out to eat, it was once a month. If we had a television, it was one black and white model, and we had four channels, maybe 5 (or fewer depending upon where we lived). We had one telephone in the house, if we were middle class.
Today, poverty means have a less extensive cell-phone plan than your upper class friends. Poverty means having to get by with a 36″ color TV rather than a 45″ flat screen with HD, and having the basic cable plan rather than 250 DirectTV channels. Shoot, I remember how JFK’s funeral took all the Saturday cartoons away–it would never happen today. Kids whose moms are on welfare have shoes that I would never have even dreamed of.
You may have me by a few years, but not many. I did my master’s thesis on a typewriter and my dissertation on a KayPro2. I’ve seen what technology has done. And yet the 1980s were the most dynamic decade of my life, not the 1960s. Even with unemployment at 9% officially, there are far more people working in the U.S. today than there were in the 1960s or 1970s.
Now, imagine if the federal government weren’t depriving us of lots and lots of jobs because it refuses to allow us to take advantage of the natural resources with which our country was blessed. Our country is like Harrison Bergeron in the story by Vonnegut, bound with chains and yet striving to succeed.
BTW, when I was growing up there were women in my neighborhood who washed clothes with a washboard and used a manual ringer before they hung the clothes up to dry. There were very few dishwashers (except for moms and kids). Women couldn’t work because they didn’t have time. Is that the good old days? Is that what we should return to?
You haven’t burst my bubble, in large part because I never had a bubble–I do have a realistic sense of the dislocations and the benefits of genuine progress. That’s genuine progress, not the so-called progress that is the march of big government favored by progressives, a march that is really a return to the feudalism of the middle ages.

Nice try Mr. Paul, but you failed to answer much of any of my claims. As I said, and I will stand by it, automation will kill life as we know it. The unfortunate part of your comments is your pathetic claim that women didn’t work, because they were too busy at home. In truth, what happened was that the 40 hour work week of 1952 got replaced by an 80 hour work week today in order to accomplish the same goals. My mother was home my full time as a child until I graduated from high school. I had 3 siblings and my father’s job was certainly not that great, BUT….he was able to provide us with a 3 bedroom home, an auto, sometimes two, a route to college, clothes, full medical and dental coverage along with eyeglasses coverage and that was for the whole family. His same job today would get him a third of a home, little medical coverage, an ability to take a huge loan out for his kids education, and my mother would have had to go to work full time, divorce my father and marry a millionaire, or go on welfare, because there were four children. All the families were able to raise several children with a normal job. None of the kids were in day care.
Your comments were meaningless regarding TV size, as a 21″ black and white TV was state of the art in the early 1950’s. Have you had any doctors making housecalls to you lately? I had that as a child. You never responded to the FACT that today, at minimum wage, you get 2 gallons of gas for one hour of work. In 1962, you could get 5.6 gallons of gas for one hour of identical minimum wage work. You could go to a market with a station wagon and fill it to the brim with food for $20. That was 5 hours worth of work for my dad at that time. Today, he would spend $200 at least for the same amount of food, but his wages would be $18/hr instead of $4. How much do you pay for medical insurance? How about college tuition. All of the necessities have gone up drastically, but I will give you credit. I can buy a much better digital watch for $6 at Walmart than my old $1.50 Westclox Scotty pocketwatch.
Making the claim there are more jobs today is easy to to make, because the population has doubled, and remember, everyone requires something…food, etc. The problem we are having is that it is taking less and less and less people to provide those things. Forget about the natural resources argument. I came from timber country. You can count the oldgrowth trees in the US on one hand practically. The timber industry has had access to 99.9% of all the timber the US has grown, and they still feel they should have the old growth with is one tenth of one percent. If you had a thousand trees in your backyard, do you think it would be unreasonable to ask you to leave just ONE out of every thousand? Remember, these are national and state forests, not personal land that a timber company owns. Frankly, I think my grandchildren should have a RIGHT to be able to see what an old growth piece of timber looks like in spite of your desire to rape the country’s resources to nothing. Nobody considered replanting until the settlers found the Pacific Ocean after logging from the east coast westward. Without clean air, clean water, and a sustainable environment, we will all be pau.

Well, Ms. Kim, you have managed to overwhelm me with your negativity. Yes, healthcare is more today, though the artificial limbs, organ transplants, and antibioticsd might be just a tad better. Yes, food costs more today, making one wonder why the government works so hard at turning good corn into lousy fuel. Yes, automation eliminates some manual-labor-jobs, though thank goodness there are people to service the machines. (Remember the good old days when every town had jobs for stable boys? What happened to those jobs?)
Do you really think there were all these really old trees before Europeans came here? Do you really think only humans can start forest fires?
So what’s your solution to our problems? Sjould the government force us all back to the glorious 1950s?
Or what about this: have you ever thought about moving to Alberta or Alaska? You might find the kind of life you seem to yearn for?
Or will it only be good if somehow you can drag us all back to the good old days?
As for me, I much prefer life with cell phones and microwaves. And if we could somehow get DC to let the markets work, things would get even better. IMHO

40 acres and a mule, hand dug wells, outhouses, “the flux”, polio, scarlet fever, steam locomotives, desks with ink fountains, writing slates, lard sandwiches. Veterans were from the Spanish American War, Indian Wars, and some from the War of Northern Aggression. What great medical care they got!
Too bad the bureaucrats weren’t there to stop Henry Ford, A. G. Bell, Tom Edison, the Wright brothers and their kind from pillaging the village and ruining such a cozy little society. OOOOH, I can hardly wait to go back! This was the world my father and his sisters were born into. The one thing they had that we don’t is a sense of pride, self reliance and personal responsibility. But why would we need that unless “the man” says we do?

[…] wanted to take something that didn’t belong to him, but figured there was no need to use the government as middleman. Rate this: Share this:PrintEmailFacebookTwitterMoredeliciousDiggFarkLinkedInRedditStumbleUponLike […]

[…] I periodically praise Chuck Asay for being a great political cartoonist. I’m not sure if my favorite is this one featuring the three little pigs, or this one showing why parasites shouldn’t kill their host animal. […]

[…] Simply stated, in the absence of competitive pressure, politicians will over-tax and over-spend until the welfare state collapses of its own weight. Some of them self-destruct anyhow because sometimes politicians can’t resist myopic policy decisions even when they know the house of cards will come tumbling down. Greece is a good example, though this cartoon shows the same phenomenon in a more amusing fashion. […]

[…] illustrates how the welfare states lures a growing number of people to ride in the wagon. And this cartoon shows the consequences of too many moochers and not enough producers. Rate this: Share this:PrintEmailFacebookTwitterMoredeliciousDiggFarkLinkedInRedditStumbleUponLike […]

[…] And even though parasites should understand it doesn’t make sense to kill their host animals, this cartoon illustrates how the welfare states lures a growing number of people to ride in the wagon. And this cartoon shows the consequences of too many moochers and not enough producers. […]

[…] And even though parasites should understand it doesn’t make sense to kill their host animals, this cartoon illustrates how the welfare states lures a growing number of people to ride in the wagon. And this cartoon shows the consequences of too many moochers and not enough producers. […]

[…] And even though parasites should understand it doesn’t make sense to kill their host animals, this cartoon illustrates how the welfare states lures a growing number of people to ride in the wagon. And this cartoon shows the consequences of too many moochers and not enough producers. […]

[…] And even though parasites should understand it doesn’t make sense to kill their host animals, this cartoon illustrates how the welfare states lures a growing number of people to ride in the wagon. And this cartoon shows the consequences of too many moochers and not enough producers. […]

[…] Here are two amusing cartoons about the dependency mindset, a great Chuck Asay cartoon showing what happens when there’s nothing left to steal, as well as the famous riding-in-the-wagon cartoons produced by a former Cato intern. Rate […]

[…] Here are two amusing cartoons about the dependency mindset, a great Chuck Asay cartoon showing what happens when there’s nothing left to steal, as well as the famous riding-in-the-wagon cartoons produced by a former Cato […]

[…] Chuck Asay has produced some great political cartoons, including personal favorites such as the Geithner-Obama tractor, the big-bad-wolf economic climate, and (his all-time best, in my humble opinion) the nothing-left-to-steal warning for statists. […]

[…] Chuck Asay has produced some great political cartoons, including personal favorites such as the Geithner-Obama tractor, the big-bad-wolf economic climate, and (his all-time best, in my humble opinion) the nothing-left-to-steal warning for statists. […]

Military spending is determined by the Congress, and Congressmen seem to think that decisions about military spending should be judged by how much money such spending brings into their own states or districts. If our Congressmen put country ahead of re-election, we wouldn’t have such excessive spending. Of course, I realize that we’ll have Congressmen like that when pigs can fly.

[…] Chuck Asay – Since I’m a budget wonk, I should choose his cartoon about the garbage-in, garbage-out approach of the Congressional Budget Office. But for mass appeal, this tractor cartoon and this regime-uncertainty cartoon are much better. And my favorite is this nothing-left-to-steal masterpiece. […]

[…] Here are two amusing cartoons about the dependency mindset, a great Chuck Asay cartoon showing what happens when there’s nothing left to steal, as well as the famous riding-in-the-wagon cartoons produced by a former Cato […]

[…] Chuck Asay – Since I’m a budget wonk, I should choose his cartoon about the garbage-in, garbage-out approach of the Congressional Budget Office. But for mass appeal, this tractor cartoon and this regime-uncertainty cartoon are much better. And my favorite is this nothing-left-to-steal masterpiece. […]

[…] Chuck Asay has produced some great political cartoons, including personal favorites such as the Geithner-Obama tractor, the big-bad-wolf economic climate, and (his all-time best, in my humble opinion) the nothing-left-to-steal warning for statists. […]

[…] Leftists, by contrast, obviously can’t be pleased by the way Obamacare is imploding in the short run, but they nonetheless may think that it will be worth it in the medium run because more people will be dependent on government (though they may regret their choice in the long run). […]